1. Irish Club Membership renewal. Due by end March - JimH reminded those present to renew. 2. Picnic? - TerryB - picnic had been scheduled for today, but given the weather forecast, Terry had decided to poke his head out closer to the time and report then. This was done and it appeared to be quite OK for the event. 3.a. Dustbuster This program was recommended as being very good as a registry cleaner. I've forgotten the url. (Trevor) 3.b Kodak Express - JimH. Jim told us that a newer version than that supplied with some scanners of Kodak Express was available. He lent the CD ROM to one of the attendees. May I borrow it next meeting Jim? Trevor. 4. XP - better news - RodB Further work and fiddling with my XP system threw up some hope for the future. At least after loading the latest driver for my internal modem communications worked. Attempting to download and install Windows Updates did not though. Download was OK, but the installation stalled. Having already noticed that there seemed to be some sort of problem with the second 30GB partition on one of my disks as far XP was concerned (very slow boot and inability to see it correctly, even though 98SE had no problem), I was not altogether surprised to find that the next time I booted 98 it found problems with that disk, which it corrected, and I was able to see data related to the Update install there. I then rebooted XP and it could not see that data. Another reboot to 98 and it could again see it with no other action. I used Fdisk (from the 98 startup disk) to remove and recreate the second partition at 20GB, thereby limiting the total usage of the disk to less than 30GB. XP is now very happy and my problems are now reduced to whether the programs I use operationally are going to work with it. 5.a. The beginning of the end of money 5.b. C&C Mship list - JohnS. a. I used the somewhat inflammatory title deliberately. Of course I didn't mean the end of the monetary system - what would feed the greed? But the end of notes and loose change. The process that (loosely) started with IOUs, cheques and now credit cards. This week I received from my bank a FREE USB card reader to read my "smart" VISA card. At present it seems that it's main use is to "Verify" my card for easy use on-line (at a currently very limited number of on-line retailers). But once smart card technology is perfected and they become accepted for small purchases such as vending machines, etc. Then an obvious extension is to allow on-line banking to transfer money from your account to "re-charge" the card. We lucky "information rich" people can do away with most trips to the bank (assuming they are still accessible) and ATM. Other less fortunate people will have to re-charge their cards at ATMs or similar. Even though Smart card technology has proved reasonably difficult to implement - there is no doubt that the banks feel that the technology will be useable very soon. They are not normally known for GIVING anything away. I passed around the reader and the "business card" CD which contains the software - the latter seemed to draw the most interest... b. Passed around the E-mailing and Web based membership lists for corrections and additions. 6. Advice on firewalls please - NigelW From ChessK: Ref: http://www.firewallguide.com/software.htm for a review of personal firewalls. I have to note that no serious, corporate firewalls are included. If you consider that ALL corporate firewalls except Sidewinder have been breached, then you would have little trust in these personal attempts. For more serious security including Firewalls try: http://www.manos.com/sec_links.html but I found many links broken. Real firewalls are on: http://www.securityspace.com/sszone/data/Security_Zone/Firewalls/ "That was no consolation on May 19, when a San Diego computer engineer found a flaw in Gauntlet while performing a routine security audit, BW Online has learned. The flaw, if exploited, could allow hackers to break into tens of thousands of supposedly protected computer networks. The engineer, Jim N. Stickley, immediately notified Santa Clara (Calif.)-based Network Associates and helped it come up with a fix for the program. But the breach was a shocker for the firewall industry as a whole. "If companies that specialize in security can't write secure software, what should we expect of the rest of the world?" says Elias Levy, the chief technology officer of computer security Web portal SecurityFocus.com (www.securityfocus.com)." " audience of several hundred network security professionals watched with rapt attention last week as a trio of hackers repeatedly penetrated one of the industry's most trusted and popular firewall products -- Checkpoint Software's Firewall-1. The demonstration, presented at the "Black Hat" security conference in Las Vegas, challenged the widely accepted notion that firewalls are largely immune to direct attack. The panel -- John McDonald and Thomas Lopatic of German security firm Data Protect GmbH and Dug Song of the University of Michigan -- identified three general categories of firewall attacks. They began by demonstrating a number of relatively simple techniques by which an attacker could impersonate an authorized administrator, and thus gain access to the firewall application itself." 7. Maximum no of EIDE devices - CharlieK Charlie is drawing up specs for a new machine and was considering a full tower case rather than a midi tower, however he wondered if there was much point given that there was a limit of 4 eide devices which could be installed. What was the point of having all those extra storage device slots if you couldn't use them. One view was that there were PCI cards which could be added to increase the number of eide connections possible. The other point was that extra devices could be added using the scsi interface. 8. Breaking wrong associations of data files with inappropiate software (globally) - Nigel W. From Nigel: [select, then right click with shift key down recommended. I've not tried it yet]. A useful meeting. I got my green card to join the Irish Club. Nigel W Derek suggested right clicking on the file and then clicking on "OPEN WITH ..." will bring up the file associations window. Select the program to open the file and then click the box labelled "Always use this program to open these files" John S suggested that earlier that pre- Me Windows versions do not have the "Open with" option, Ctl-right-c;ick is required. 9. Free v. fee software - MikeD. 10. PDF programs - Derek Derek had found that some pdf files created with PDF995 were larger than those created with Acrobat, contrary to claims made in the North C&C last week. The ensuing discussion confirmed that either pdf program may produce the smaller file, depending on the source material. 11. PHP? - TedM What is PHP? Alan M said that it is a scripting language for creating a web page, eg like the PCUG's WWW page to get e-mail. (TedM) 12. Windows sizing - RodS. I have been bringing this topic up at succeeding C&C meetings for some time. "I want to be able to have the opening screen of a program appear as full size each time I open it." ============================ Various suggestions have been made, all without success, but today I hit the jackpot. If the program is being opened from a shortcut (which I am) then one of the properties of the shortcut is to select a window size. ie Right click, Properties, Maximize, Apply. This does not work unless a shortcut is used. Other, unsuccessful, suggestions have been: a. Close the program by clicking on the top left corner of the maximized window and that size is fixed - or any other size if desired. This window is non standard and did not have a box in the top left corner. b. Maximize the window and close by means of the Close option in the File menu. This program does not hace a Close option. 13. Win98SE upgrade - Bill 14. Celeron v PIII - Kevin. =========== My thanks to all, Trevor -*"*-.,,.-*"*-.,,.-*"*-.,,.-*"*-.,,.-*"*- Two rules for life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know. 2. ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/ ******************************************************
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